Together, Devo and Brian Eno created one of the most influential albums in new wave history — yet the pairing was far from perfect.
Eno served as the band’s producer for their 1978 debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!. During a recent appearance on the Bob Lefsetz podcast, Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh looked back on the experience of working with Eno.
“I think he was unprepared for us, and we were kind of unprepared for him,” the singer admitted, noting that Eno wanted “bigger aesthetic input than he got.”
“When we were mixing [the album], he was trying to put other things into the songs. You know, synth parts, and we did use some of it. I mean, we did use David [Bowie’s] and Brian’s backup vocals on ‘Uncontrollable Urge,’ for instance. And he put like monkey chants in ‘Jocko Homo.’”
Still, Mothersbaugh was sure to keep Eno from imparting too much of his influence on the LP, an act that garnered more than a few glares from the producer.
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“I was doing things like, we’d hit record for recording from the twenty four track over to the two track stereo master, and everybody’d be looking straight ahead at the speakers, but I’d be standing next to Brian and I’d just reach up and pull down the tracks that said Brian guitar and David vocals,” Mothersbaugh recalled. “And I just keep looking straight ahead, and out of my peripheral vision, I could see [Eno’s] head snap and look at me. But he never said anything. He never challenged me about it, and so that was odd.”
As the band’s creative relationship with Eno fractured, Bowie was called in to remix some of the tracks. Despite the creative drama, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! became a landmark release, blending new wave, punk and art rock into a sound unlike anything heard before.
Mark Mothersbaugh’s History With Brian Eno
Prior to working with Eno, Mothersbaugh was a fan, notably pointing to the impact Roxy Music had on him.
“I remember hearing the first Roxy album and I’d been playing with synthesizers for about a year at this point,” Motherbaugh recalled. “I got to this throwaway song called ‘Editions of You,’ and it was just like this song where they gave everybody a solo, like if you were a band playing at a nightclub or something.”
Eno’s solo in particular captivated the aspiring rocker.
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“All of a sudden, the synths started and this guy’s playing a synthesizer, and it was like, definitely, it was like a moment where I went, ‘That’s it.’ This guy, whoever this guy is, he knows how to make synth sounds that are unique and that no one’s ever heard before,” Mothersbaugh explained. “I heard the solo by Eno, Brian Eno, in this song, and it was incredible and it totally helped me turn my world upside down to find a direction to how to look for sound and how to experiment with sense.”
